HARTAIXX2016-V013000

Summary

The video script explores the visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who embodied the Enlightenment era with his utopian architectural concepts. Focusing on the 'City of the Dead' and other unbuildable projects, Boullée's work symbolized societal reorganization and the sublime. His designs, though theoretical, influenced modern architecture, emphasizing form over function and the emotional impact of geometric shapes on human senses.

Takeaways

• 🏛️ The concept of architects being interested in institutions and public buildings was novel during the Renaissance, with the idea of an ideal city and new public institutions for social reorganization emerging fully in the 18th century.
• 🏗️ Étienne-Louis Boullée, an 18th-century architect, was influential in envisioning public buildings as part of utopian schemes during the Enlightenment, a period marked by social philosophy and new forms of government.
• 📜 Boullée's work, largely theoretical and existing in the form of drawings, focused on monumental and colossal structures, many of which were unbuildable at the time, yet they were influential in shaping modern and contemporary architecture.
• 🏙️ Boullée's 'City of the Dead' design extended the concept of a cemetery into an entire urban fabric, with architecture that metaphorically represented nature and the eternal.
• 🏛️ Boullée developed a typology of public buildings, including churches, cemeteries, libraries, and schools, reflecting a utopian aspiration to rewrite society through architecture.
• 🎨 Boullée's architecture was deeply engaged with the aesthetic philosophy of the time, particularly the concept of the sublime, which aimed to evoke a sense of awe and the infinite through art and nature.
• 📐 Boullée sought to create architecture that was transcendent and philosophical, using geometric forms to invoke human sensations and reactions, with an ambition to make architecture as impactful as poetry.
• 🗿 His designs, referred to as 'speaking architecture,' aimed to have buildings explain their function or identity through their formal attributes, typifying a set of characteristics to elicit specific reactions from viewers.
• 🛡️ Boullée's military architecture, for example, was intended to convey the idea of force through its form, with symbolic elements like a massive shield and piles of cannonballs, rather than focusing on practical construction techniques.
• 🏙️ Despite the utopian and theoretical nature of Boullée's designs, they were often tied to and inspired by contemporaneous architectural projects that were actually built, showing a translation of the real into the ideal.
• 🌌 Boullée's work represents the rise of public building typologies in the 18th century, characterized by utopian aspirations, large scale, and highly formalized geometric vocabularies.

Q & A

What was new about the architectural approach to institutions during the Renaissance?

The script suggests that the concept of 'institutionalism' and the imagining of public buildings for social reorganization was a completely new development during the Renaissance period.

When did the idea of the ideal city and public institutions as a means to reorganize social order first emerge?

The idea of the ideal city and the creation of public institutions to reorganize the social order first emerged fully articulated in the 18th century.

Who is Étienne-Louis Boullée and why is he significant in architectural history?

Étienne-Louis Boullée was an 18th-century academically trained architect known for his visionary and influential ideas. He is significant for his theoretical work and his influence on modern and contemporary architecture, despite building relatively little.

What is the 'City of the Dead' by Boullée and how does it relate to the concept of the ideal city?

The 'City of the Dead' is a pen-and-ink drawing by Boullée from the 1780s, depicting an urban fabric extending a cemetery into an entire city. It represents the ideal city as eternal as nature itself, with architecture in symbiosis and metaphor for the natural landscape.

What was Boullée's approach to designing public buildings?

Boullée's approach to designing public buildings involved creating a typology of structures such as churches, cemeteries, libraries, schools, and military forts. His designs were characterized by utopian aspirations and the idea of rewriting society through architecture.

What aesthetic philosophy did Boullée engage with in his architecture?

Boullée engaged with the aesthetic philosophy of the sublime in his architecture, aiming to create a sense of awe and overwhelming scale that corresponds to the immeasurable and unrepresentable.

What is the concept of 'architecture parlante' or 'speaking architecture'?

'Architecture parlante' or 'speaking architecture' is a concept developed by Boullée, where buildings explain their function or identity through their formal attributes, essentially 'speaking' their names and purpose.

How did Boullée's designs reflect the utopian aspirations of the 18th century?

Boullée's designs reflected utopian aspirations through the creation of unbuildable projects on paper, presenting public buildings with huge scales and highly formalized geometric vocabularies, symbolizing societal reimagining and possibilities.

What was Boullée's stance on the practicality of his architectural designs?

Boullée was not interested in the practicality or technical feasibility of his designs. He was more focused on their symbolic apparatus and social utility, prioritizing the symbolic aspect of architecture over practical implications.

How did Boullée's designs relate to the philosophical ideas of his time?

Boullée's designs were deeply influenced by the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly the concept of the sublime. His work aimed to evoke a sublime reaction in viewers through the use of vastness, infinity, and powerful geometric forms.

How did Boullée's approach to architecture differ from traditional views, such as those of Vitruvius?

Boullée dismissed traditional views like those of Vitruvius, who was too focused on engineering and technical issues. Instead, Boullée was interested in the symbolic and philosophical aspects of architecture, aiming to create a transcendent experience through abstract forms.

Outlines

00:00

🏛️ Architectural Visions of the Enlightenment

Erika Naginski discusses the emergence of institutional architecture during the Renaissance and its full articulation in the 18th century, exemplified by architects like Ledoux and Boullée. Boullée, in particular, is highlighted for his visionary ideas and influence on modern architecture, despite building little. His 'City of the Dead' drawing from the 1780s is analyzed as a metaphor for the ideal city, with architecture in harmony with nature. The summary touches on Boullée's academic background, his role in the Enlightenment, and his pursuit of creating public buildings that could reorganize social order and embody utopian aspirations.

05:01

🌅 The Sublime in Architectural Expression

This paragraph delves into Boullée's engagement with the aesthetic philosophy of the 18th century, specifically the concept of the sublime. The sublime is characterized by qualities such as obscurity, power, vastness, and infinity, which Boullée sought to translate into architectural forms. His designs aimed to create a transcendent architectural experience, invoking a phenomenological response from viewers. The 'funerary monument' serves as an example of Boullée's 'buried architecture,' symbolizing death and the unrepresentable through monumental gateways to cemeteries. The concept of 'architecture parlante' or 'speaking architecture' is introduced, where buildings express their function through their form, as seen in Boullée's utopian designs that prioritize symbolic meaning over practicality.

10:01

🛡️ Symbolic Fortifications and Architectural Signs

The focus shifts to Boullée's military architecture, which aimed to embody the idea of force rather than adhere to practical construction techniques. His designs, such as a military fort and a chapel of the dead, utilized symbolic elements like massive shields and piles of cannonballs to convey indestructibility and commemoration. Boullée's work is described as an architecture of signs, where form and repetition are used to communicate the building's identity and character. His writings are examined for their philosophical underpinnings, particularly the connection between architecture, nature, and the sublime, with the architect positioned as a creator of light and emotions through architectural design.

15:03

🏙️ Visionary Architecture and the Reality of Construction

The final paragraph explores the connection between Boullée's visionary, unbuildable projects and the contemporaneous architectural projects that were actually constructed. It discusses how Boullée used real buildings as a basis to create his idealized, scaled-up versions, as seen in his designs for a metropolitan church compared to Soufflot's Church of St. Genevieve. The summary emphasizes Boullée's method of translating the real into the ideal, creating a new typology that was tied to the practical, built world, yet pushed the boundaries of architectural imagination and form.

Keywords

💡Renaissance

The Renaissance was a period of European history, spanning the 14th to the 17th century, marked by a cultural rebirth and renewed interest in classical learning and values. In the script, the Renaissance is mentioned as a time when the concept of public buildings and institutionalism was new, setting the stage for later developments in architectural thought.

💡Ideal City

The 'ideal city' is a concept that has been explored by architects and urban planners throughout history, representing a vision of a perfect urban environment. In the video script, the ideal city is discussed in the context of architects like Boullée, who used it as a framework for imagining new public institutions and reorganizing social order.

💡Étienne-Louis Boullée

Étienne-Louis Boullée was an 18th-century French architect known for his visionary and theoretical work, much of which was unbuildable but highly influential. The script highlights Boullée's 'City of the Dead' and his role as a key figure in Enlightenment thought, with his designs reflecting the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of his time.

💡French Revolution

The French Revolution, which began in 1789, was a period of radical social and political change in France. The script mentions the French Revolution as a backdrop to Boullée's work, illustrating how architects like him were influenced by and responded to the societal upheavals of the time.

💡Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement of the 18th century that emphasized reason, individualism, and the scientific method. The script describes the Enlightenment as the era during which Boullée's career spanned, and it was a period that saw the emergence of new social philosophies, democratic ideals, and forms of government.

💡Sublime

In aesthetics, the 'sublime' refers to a quality of grandeur, vastness, or power that inspires awe, fear, or wonder. The script discusses Boullée's attempt to capture the sublime in architecture, aiming to evoke the same sense of overwhelming awe that one might experience in the face of nature's infinity or God's greatness.

💡Typology

Typology in architecture refers to the classification of buildings based on their form and function. The script mentions Boullée's development of typologies for public buildings, such as churches, cemeteries, and libraries, which were part of his utopian vision for society.

💡Architecture Parlante

Architecture parlante, or 'speaking architecture,' is a concept where buildings are designed to express their function or identity through their form. The script describes how Boullée developed this idea, with his designs intended to communicate their purpose through their form and appearance.

💡Utopian

Utopian refers to an ideal or imaginary society that is considered perfect or idyllic. The script discusses Boullée's work as part of a utopian undertaking, where architects envisioned new forms of public buildings to reflect and inspire societal change.

💡Funerary Monument

A funerary monument is a structure erected in memory of the dead. The script uses the term in relation to Boullée's designs for a monumental gateway to a cemetery, which are meant to evoke the theme of death and the unrepresentable through architectural form.

💡Geometric Forms

Geometric forms are shapes defined by mathematics, such as spheres, pyramids, and quadrangles. The script describes how Boullée used these forms in his designs to create symbolic and transcendent architecture, with each form thematizing a given purpose or use.

Highlights

Architects' interest in institutions and their typologies emerged in the Renaissance.

The fully articulated relationship between ideal cities and public institutions appeared in the 18th century.

Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary architect who explored the concept of the 'City of the Dead' in the 1780s.

Boullée, born in 1728 and died in 1799, was an academically trained architect and a key figure of the Enlightenment.

He was a proponent of classical ideas and pure geometric forms, creating many unbuildable yet influential architectural drawings.

Boullée's work includes various public building typologies like churches, cemeteries, libraries, schools, and military forts.

His architecture aimed to create a sublime experience, a concept that describes being awestruck by the infinity of nature or God.

Boullée's architecture focused on symbolic aspects rather than practical implications, using geometric shapes to evoke specific reactions.

He developed the concept of 'buried architecture,' where colossal structures are partially buried to represent the tomb.

Boullée's 'architecture parlante' means buildings explain their function or identity through their formal attributes.

He believed in the power of architecture to evoke human sensations, like feeling horror at darkness or jubilation at light.

Boullée's drawings served as templates for inciting sublime reactions in viewers.

His architectural language of utopia involved regularized solids, gargantuan spheres, pyramids, and large quadrangles.

Boullée transformed real architectural projects into idealized, fantastically scaled representations through drawing.

Despite their sublime nature, Boullée's projects were often tied to contemporaneous architectural projects that were actually built.

Transcripts

ERIKA NAGINSKI: Now it would seem a given that architects would be interested in institutions and in

studying their typologies and developing their typologies but one has to remember that this

institutionalism this imagining of public buildings was completely new in the Renaissance.

What's important for us is that this relation of the ideal city and inventing institutions

or public institutions anew with which to reorganize the social order really emerged

fully articulated only for the first time in the 18th century, so centuries later with

architects like Ledoux, who is looking at the factory as a kind of template for an ideal

society, and also with the works of the architect to whom I want now to turn, Étienne-Louis

Boullée, another one of these visionary architects whose "City of the Dead" I'm now going to

turn to.

This is a pen-and-ink drawing from the 1780s, so we're dealing with the decade before the

French Revolution broke out.

The French Revolution begins in 1789.

Boullée is an extraordinary character, historically, along these lines.

He's an academically trained architect.

His career spans the 18th century, this period we call the Enlightenment: the period that

saw the birth of social philosophy, of notions of democracy, of new forms of government that

would challenge royal authority, and by the end of the century, of course, with the American

Revolution and the French Revolution, we see society actually rewritten.

So it's no surprise that utopian schemes and the imagining of public buildings would occur

in this historical context.

But to go back to Boullée, this is an architect who was born in 1728, and he died in 1799,

the very year the French Revolution came to an end.

So he is, actually, a kind of perfect fit as a kind of architectural figura of the Enlightenment.

He's someone who was elected to France's official architectural institution: the Royal Academy

of Architecture.

He took himself to be a great proponent of classical ideas and of pure geometric forms

in architecture.

He, essentially, imagined a whole series of public buildings.

He fetishized the colossal in architecture, and most of all, most curiously, he built

relatively little.

His oeuvre is, essentially, found in drawings like this one of unbuildable projects, in

fact.

Yet, he emerged as one of the most influential theorists and teachers of his time.

And we can continue to feel his legacy in modern and contemporary architecture.

So how does he show us a "City of the Dead," a kind of urban fabrication that extends the

cemetery into an entire city fabric.

We have at the rear of the image a domed basilica, obviously a centralized structure, which is

elevated, and, if you notice, the curves and lines of its contours actually formalize the

silhouette of the mountain, the huge mountain that's rising behind it.

In other words, here architecture is not simply in symbiosis with nature; it's actually a

metaphor for it.

You sense the ghost of the ideal city in this so-called "City of the Dead," rendered as

eternal as nature itself.

And you're going to see in the drawings that we're going to look through Boullée, like

Ledoux, began to develop a whole typology of public buildings: churches, cemeteries,

libraries, schools, military forts; and, in this, of course, is inscribed a utopian aspiration,

a rewriting of society through architecture.

There's another aspect of Boullée's architecture that we need to address, however.

They are deeply engaged with the aesthetic philosophy of the period.

In particular, Boullée is looking to create a kind of equivalent, in architecture, to

what the philosophers who were his contemporaries called the sublime.

This is a concept that was developed in the 18th century; it was used to describe, imagine

the state of being awestruck, of being overwhelmed by the infinity of nature, by the infinity

of God-- in other words, by things that seem so incommensurable that we don't know how

to take account of them, that we actually don't know how to represent them.

In other words, the sublime corresponds to that which is immeasurable, unrepresentable,

inconceivable.

Boullée's writings and his images-- these pen-and-ink sketches-- sought to take those

kinds of qualities associated with the sublime, and they were conveniently typologized by

philosophers-- I'm thinking, in particular, of Edmund Burke or Immanuel Kant-- by the

end of the century, and these qualities can be identified as follows: obscurity, power,

vastness, infinity, magnificence, silence, suddenness, the intermittent sound or the

intermittent sight, and Boullée took these ideas and turned them into architecture.

What he was after, ultimately, was to make architecture somehow transcendent, to make

architecture reach a kind of philosophical condition.

And what it so interesting here is that, somehow, we're returning to the phenomenology of architecture.

In other words, how our bodies, how our senses react to the spaces around us, to the architectural

spaces around us.

So how does this work?

How does this work in terms of a paper architecture?

What I'm showing you here is what Boullée called "a funerary monument characterizing

the genre of a buried architecture."

What does this mean?

Well, first, it means that the image is, somehow, thematically tied to the sublime because the

subject or purpose of the building we see is, in fact, an architecture of death.

It is a kind of monumental gateway to a cemetery, if you will.

So it's representing the unrepresentable in architectural form.

This is quite a contradiction.

Second-- the title is a giveaway to this-- it characterizes what Boullée called a genre

or type.

This is an important word in the 18th century: type or typology.

It's a genre or type of architecture, and so, presumably, it typifies a set of characteristics

or properties.

These characteristics, or properties, are meant to have a certain effect or prompt a

certain kind of reaction on the viewer.

Third, that genre or type actually has a name.

Boullée calls it "buried architecture."

The idea here is that you, actually, bury a colossal structure so that architecture

itself becomes an analogy to the tomb.

Out of this typologizing, out of this searching for a typological formatting of public buildings,

Boullée developed what later would be called "architecture parlante," or "speaking architecture."

This is very much along the lines of what Ledoux was doing at the saltworks.

And the idea is that buildings somehow explain their function or explain their identity through

their formal attributes.

They speak their names.

The idea emerged in Boullée's collected writings and his drawings, which, essentially, span

this late 18th-century period from about 1778 into the French Revolution, into 1793.

And all of this manifested itself in utopian terms, in an architecture on paper that was

rendered monochromatically and that offered a kind of panoply of unbuildable edifices

presenting projects for public buildings moored to huge scale, to largeness of scale, and

highly formalized geometric vocabularies.

This is the rise of public building and public building typologies, and we understand that

when we go back the 18th century that this was a fundamentally utopian undertaking.

So what was this architectural language of utopia, if you will.

Well, it's based on regularized solids, gargantuan spheres, pyramids, huge quadrangles, with

each geometric form, somehow, thematizing a given purpose, a given use.

The result is that the symbolic aspect of architecture-- in other words, how you invoke

the character of a structure-- superseded all practical implications.

In other words, Boullée was absolutely not interested in whether these could be built

or not.

He was interested in their symbolic apparatus and their social utility.

So the example here is a military fort, and, for Boullée, military architecture needed

to suggest "the idea of force."

Accordingly, what you see in the drawing, or what you see in Boullée's imagining of

the fort, is that the actual techniques, the technologies of construction here, are pretty

much irrelevant.

He's not interested in mechanical problems, technical issues.

He actually dismissed Vitruvius for being too interested in engineering because this

was not what, for Boullée, the primary purpose of architecture.

The primary purpose of architecture was to imagine possibilities, for Boullée.

Instead, he was far more interested in how we, literally, read the identity of his structure,

which is a round central tower flanked by four square ones set on the diagonal.

In other words, this is an architecture of signs.

You have an absolutely massive shield-- it's, in fact, the shield of the great Greek warrior

Achilles-- plastered on the facade.

You have walls so massive that they give the idea of indestructibility, and the fact that

they actually couldn't be built was completely beside the point for Boullée.

You have piles of cannon balls and cannons set to each side of the flanking towers.

All of this is a kind of symbolic apparatus that produces signs so that we can read the

building, that the architecture, again, can speak its identity, speaks its character,

speaks its name.

Another example would be something like this, in this so-called geometrical elevation of

a chapel of the dead.

Again, we have the pyramidal shape, which we associate with the memorial, with commemoration,

with the end of life.

We're meant to understand this commemorative purpose through this visual illusion, if you

will, to the sublime, which Boullée actually stresses in his definition of architecture.

And when we turn to his writings, we can read into them his deliberate allusion to the philosophical

ideas that were circulating in the period.

Here is Boullée, "Architecture is the only art by which we can put Nature to work, and

this unique advantage makes manifest its Sublime aspect.

The means by which nature can be put to work, which belong to architecture, come from the

power to effect what poetry can only describe.

The art of moving us through the effects of light belongs to architecture.

For in all the monuments that are capable of stirring the soul and making us experience

the horrors of darkness, or, conversely, that create transportive sensations through brilliant

effects, the architect, who must know these means and master them, can dare to say: I

create light.

This is an extraordinarily ambitious definition of architecture, and there are several points

to retain.

First, that architecture is linked to nature.

Second, that the sublime character of architecture is based on that link to nature.

And third, Boullée's assumption that, somehow, the formal character of a building affects

our senses.

We feel horror at darkness.

We feel jubilation at light.

And, finally, the equation between architect and God: "I create light."

The assumption here is that there is a direct relationship between highly abstract forms

and human sensations, and that geometrical shapes can actually render architecture transcendent.

Drawings, in this sense, become a kind of template for the sublime and for inciting

a sublime reaction in their viewers.

Here's another one of these drawings; this one's a perspectival entrance to a cemetery

in which darkness and the pyramidal form evoke the end of life.

Over and over again, we see these mechanisms at work.

For example, in this project for a metropolitan church, where we can discern the regular succession

and uniformity of its kit of parts that, according to philosophers of the time, artificially

recreated the sense of infinity.

Listen to this account.

"Whenever we repeat any idea frequently, the mind by a sort of mechanism repeats it long

after...

Place a number of uniform and equidistant marks in regular sequence [such as a row of

columns] they will cause it to seem to extend to a length almost incredible and seem multiplied

without end...

[Likewise in a] rotunda you can nowhere fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same

object still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest.

But the parts must be uniform as well as circularly disposed, to give this figure its full force."

In this scheme of things, the architectural is actually created by the repetition of columns,

by placing uniform columnar screens on all sides.

And circularity is also crucial to the effect.

Here is shows up in this gargantuan dome, a dome technologically which could never have

been erected at the time because of its sheer size.

And, of course, to go back to the sublime; it is a rotunda that offers no boundaries

and no end points.

It is the architectural equivalent, if you will, of infinity.

And then there's the uniformity of the plan too, with four arms and entrances all exactly

alike, all the same, and, unlike Ledoux, completely devoid of program.

But now I want to return to where I began, and the idea that no mater how sublime Boullée's

projects seem, they were, nonetheless, very much tied to contemporaneous architectural

projects.

In other words, projects that were actually built.

What Boullée, in some cases, was doing was looking at the built, and then using the real

to create a fiction, to create a new typology.

So for the metropolitan church, all we need to do is to consider a church that was built

by the architect Soufflot, the Church of St. Genevieve, which is now the French Panthéon.

And if we compare the plans-- Boullée on the left, Soufflot on the right-- we can see

that, basically, what Boullée did was to take Soufflot's church and to turn it into

some kind of geometric giant.

Boullée's focus on vast dimensions, on a kind of formal purity, on a repetition is

inscribed in a sacred space that had a real precursor, a built expression in Soufflot's

church.

And what Boullée, essentially, did was to fantastically blow Soufflot's church out of

scale through representation, through drawing.

The idea, however, was already there in Soufflot's church.

This is typical of the visionary architect's translation of the real into the ideal, of

producing a fiction from the concrete.

So no matter how sublime Boullée's projects seem, they were nonetheless tied to contemporaneous

projects that were actually built.